A long time ago, being in the early days of a (better) Ken MacLeod book sounded like it might be fun. Now? We don't have the IT to support microstates. (And the IT we do have seems to be in thrall to the modern iteration of the Illinois Nazi Party.)

If you could pull off classifying yourself as a Medical Laboratory Scientist Including Cytoscientist, you'd be on the Long Term Skills Shortage list for New Zealand. A doctorate-level education plus sufficient professionally-relevant work experience plus some more work experience in general will get you past the automatic selection threshold for a Permanent Resident visa... Which you probably didn't actually wish to know, but since you asked, like.

Annoyingly, that sort of thing's exactly in my line, but as apparently the genome/ten-papers-in-Nature thing isn't enough to get me a biology job here, I suspect it won't be enough to persuade someone to do the work permit application either.

For that particular visa, if you score enough points, you can just get the visa as a self-standing individual, with no need for a job offer or any companies involved or anything. (I very very nearly had enough points to do this myself, only they weren't sure I had enough years of professional-level employment.) And then a permanent resident visa is the next best thing to citizenship, where you just have the right to live here indefinitely, can do any job you like or not and so forth. I mean, there's probably lots of reasons not to do this but that's not one, is all.

Don't you believe it! they appear to be letting all sorts in again now even tho the roads in AKL are now clogged w traffic and houses are too expensive to buy. they'd make u work in a milk factory lab in a cold rural area or in a path lab somewhere obscure. ...might be up ur street... depends how desperate...

Age probably varies. There might be somewhere. Otherwise, head over for a few weeks and hang around the bars looking hopeful? Again, a long shot but at least as plausible as anything I'd already thought of.

The hard limit is 55 (or it was when I was doing this last year) although you get fewer points if you pass thresholds at 40, 45 and 50. When I worked that out I did a major rush job to get the application on their desk before my 40th birthday, and managed it by two days...

Rather than leave the country, wait for the country you are in to leave everything else. First it leaves the big group of countries. then the little group of countries. Edinburgh, unsatisfied with that decision, forms in own city state. Apart from Gorgie and a few other pockets of dissent. Leith decides that enough is enough and it's time to throw off the Edinburgh hegemony and builds the Pilrig Wall. Morningside erects checkpoints at Holy Corner, because you can never be too careful nowadays. Streets disassociate, then tenements, one referendum at a time. The final solipsistic defiance sees each flat become an independent self-governing entity, because after all, the common stairs and back greens were always a contentious no-man's land.